The mood of the story is set by the descriptions and events in the story. John Chua, from the reference book Short Stories for Students, explains how in many of Poe’s stories, including The Tell-Tale Heart, he uses the concept of a nemesis appearing as a doppelganger, which basically is a double (233). In doing this, Poe really shows how strange his characters can get, and it helps contribute to the mysterious atmosphere. In so many of Poe’s stories, he brings up the protagonist fighting a counterpart many times, which Chua believes is an indication of Poe’s attempt to work out his own inner conflicts and psychological struggles. This can relate to mood in that the readers are experiencing a taste of his own life.

In a critic written by Martha Womack, she explains how the narrator’s “nervousness” is a frequently used literary device of Poe to establish tone through heightened states of consciousness (W

Critic Charles E. May, points out that one of the most powerful contributions Poe made to the short story genre was his insistence that every element of the work contribute to the story’s overall effect (May, Overview). Poe made his central character or narrator psychologically obsessed with a mysterious phenomenon which everything in the story revolves around. Poe uses this pattern in all his stories, and it creates his signature mood, which can be described as thrilling and mysterious. May goes on to say that even though this story is about two characters, the narrator and the old man, it is really about the narrator and his split mind. Referring to the narrator wanting to kill the old man simply because of his eye, and respecting him in every other aspect of his life, May says there is no other way to understand this kind of motivation except to declare the narrator mad, and the reader must try to determine the meaning and method of the madness. For Poe, there is no such thing as meaningless madness in fiction. This is yet another example of the bizarre, strange mood Poe can create in his writings.

omack, Poedecoder). Womack also speculates that the narrator either has some sort of phobia towards the vulture like eye of the old man, or that that narrator is referring to the origins of Gr

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